
Category: Technology


Installing Zephir with PHP 7.2
For any PHP developer wanting rapidly develop PHP extensions or optimize their PHP application, installing Zephir is a good first step towards eliminating their PHP application’s execution bottlenecks. While installation of Zephir is not terribly complicated, installing Zephir on Linux systems (such as Ubuntu) or on OS X is much easier when you understand Zephir’s architecture and how the compiler integrates with the PHP interpreter. There are two top-level steps in the installation procedure which must be done in the right order.

How to Hash a Long Password with bcrypt
Hashing is an important component in securing any application that users will log into, such as a Web application or an API for an an app, particularly when authentication is done using passwords, and bcrypt is currently a standard, acceptable way to create a secure hash. bcrypt’s acceptability may change in the future, but what won’t change is the reality that no sane person stores user passwords values as clear text in a file or database. Read More »
Listing the Current Branches of Multiple Git Repositories Under a Singe Parent Directory Using Bash
An interesting problem came up a work where I am maintaining a couple of legacy enterprise applications written in PHP. These applications were first developed over a decade ago and the version control was originally managed in SVN. Later they were moved to Git. I do not know the full reason why, though I have a theory, but both applications break down into multiple components, each of which is managed in a separate Git repository. This isn’t a huge issue, but it does create headaches when working on multiple tickets that impact multiple components. I want to make my changes for each ticket on a new Git branch for that ticket while leaving unmodified components on their master branch in Git. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy solution to figure out what branch each Git repository is pointed at, a problem when there are perhaps ten separate repositories that all interact with each other.
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SSHFS on OS X via Fuse and the Horrible Dot Underscore Turd Files
Once again, I have been issued a Mac to do development work, and as usual everything unixish on OS X almost works. To my delight, when faced with having to code against a Linux environment that I access via SSHRead More »
Server-Side Swift on Linux
“Can I write Web applications in Swift?” was a random question that popped into my head a few weeks ago after discovering Swift.org, a project that moves Swift programming language out of the domain specific role of replacing Objective C as the defacto language for building apps targeting Apple’s iOS and OS X platforms and into the Open Source ecosystem. The answer is, yes, thanks to the work being done by Perfect.
Boycott San Francisco!
People love San Francisco. There’s the great food, the proximity to wine country, and a general lack of snow. San Francisco has a rich heritage of counter culture, dreamers, homosexual poets, hippies, hipsters, and yuppies. Yes, I said it: yuppies. Read More »
URL Rewriting via VirtualHost Directive for the Slim PHP Framework
I’ve been using the Slim framework on and off for the past couple of years. I find it to be a nice piece of glue to structure my PHP applications without having to buy into someone else’s entire toolkit. In fact, I use it because it lets me use whatever tools I want and works seamlessly with Composer.
One thing that I find problematic getting a Slim project up and running is the insistence of the documentation that the rewrite to the front controller on Apache be configured in an .htaccess file. This is fine for shared hosting environments, but on applications where I control the server configuration and want to harden my infrastructure by avoiding such pitfalls as putting my server configuration in my document rootRead More »